The Great Escape (13 page)

Major Davy Jones was American, mostly known as “Tokyo” because he flew on the famous American raid in 1942, when General Doolittle led them off from a carrier and they bombed Tokyo and prayed they had enough fuel left to fly on to China. A few of them made it, and Davy finished up among the Chinese guerrillas. He got to the Middle East after that and was shot down on his first trip. A short but singularly violent operational career! He came from Oklahoma, a wild and lanky creature with jet-black hair, who looked like a hawk-eyed Indian.

Piglet Lamond was the little New Zealander who had dug his way out in the spectacular “mole” tunnel from East Camp. Danny Krol, a little Pole about five feet tall, used to be a saber champion. He had a clean-cut face, straight hair brushed back, and the most perfect physique in miniature I ever saw.

Jean Regis, a Frenchman in the R.A.F., was dark and hairy and built like a gorilla. Regis was tireless. He used to sit pumping for four hours at a stretch and break into a tirade of French curses if you tried to give him a relief.

“Muckle” Muir, a tall, fair-headed Scot, had a huge handlebar mustache that he grew to keep sand out of his nose.

Ed Tovrea’s father was a big meat magnate in Arizona, and Tovrea, a good-looking youngster of about twenty-one, had been shot down on one of the first American Spitfire squadrons in England.

Buck Ingram was a big, tough Yank from Idaho with thick black hair and glinting eyes.

Johnny Staubo, the Norwegian, should have been in Hollywood. He was really a good-looking man, over six feet tall, with beautifully chiseled features and Nordic blond hair. He used to play Davis Cup tennis.

“Scruffy” Weir, another Canadian, had been flying without goggles the night he was shot down, and the plane caught fire. His helmet and oxygen mask saved most of his face but the fire caught him around the eyes, and the skin had healed thick and smooth like parchment, but was scarred purple and red.

The black-haired Birkland, also Canadian, was distinguished by a little fringe of beard around his jowls.

They all had their little peculiarities. Davy Jones had no nerves and a blind faith that a tunnel would never fall on him. Later he found out. Whenever Scruffy Weir dug, the tunnel used to take a diving turn to the left. Crump used to curse him every second day for going off course, but Scruffy kept making diving turns. Birkland used to veer to the right nearly every shift, so Crump always rostered him to dig after Scruffy to even things out. For a long time, Birkland insisted on working stark naked below, and to see him, sweat-and-sand-stained, reversing down the tunnel was an unnerving sight. Floody noticed that he was getting sand-scarred on the knees and elbows and made him wear the hated long underpants and vests. The sand scars looked too obvious.

When each tunnel was about thirty feet long, Floody changed the shoring system to conserve wood. Instead of solid framing all the way, they spaced the frames about a foot apart and laid boards over the tops.

Williams had already made three levies on bedboards throughout the camp, demanding a certain number from every room. Every bed now had about three boards missing, and the paillasses, which were never very comfortable, sagged in the gaps. You got used to it in time. Some of the rooms had double doors, and Williams sent his carpenters under the huts to rip off some of the lower floor boards. They sawed them into lengths of about eighteen inches and took them below to shore the tunnel roofs between the box frames.

With the new shoring the face had to be dug forward about two feet before they could put in a new box frame and line the roof, and the falls of sand immediately became worse. No matter how carefully you scraped the concave archway overhead, the stuff cracked and fell nearly every day. There was hardly ever enough warning to get clear; just the little cracking noise and down it came, usually burying the digger from head to hips and leaving a dome overhead.

Sometimes a couple of hundred pounds of sand fell and then number two worked fast, grabbed his half-entombed mate by the ankles and hauled him clear, sand in his eyes and ears and choking in his nose and mouth.

Nearly always the fat lamp and air line were smothered, and they were left in stifling blackness. Unable to write a note, number two trolleyed himself back to the shaft and returned with another lamp, by which time number one would probably have coughed the sand out of his nose and mouth so he could breathe again. You’d know if he could breathe by the curses.

The last four feet of the tunnel would be blocked with sand. They dug out the nozzle of the air line, emptied the sand out, and refitted it. About a third of the sand that had fallen they sent back on the trolley, and then, with just enough room to work in, number one box-framed the area of the fall. He left a little gap in the room through which he packed sand for half an hour till the dome above was filled in. Then he boarded over the gap and carried on tunneling. The exasperating thing about a fall was that, no matter how tightly you crammed it, you could only pack about two-thirds of the amount that fell back in the dome. The rest was so much extra sand to be dispersed.

One of Travis’ men relieved the fat-lamp situation a little. He’d been an electrical engineer, and he went around every hut rearranging all the electric-light wiring. When he’d finished, he had about forty bits of cable from a foot to ten feet long. He spliced them all together, tapped the power lines behind the walls, and installed electric lights in all the shafts and for the first few feet of the tunnels. It wasn’t any good during the day because the power wasn’t on, but it was a great help to the evening dispersing shifts.

On a good day when there weren’t too many ferret alarms Or falls, each tunnel crawled forward about five feet. Often it was less, but by early June “Tom” was sixty feet long and the other two weren’t far behind.

That wily man Glemnitz stopped Conk in the compound one day. “Ah, Mr. Canton,” he said affably, “how many tunnels are you digging now?”

“Just above fifty at the moment,” Conk said facetiously, and passed on.

A few minutes later Glemnitz encountered Floody and asked the same thing.

“Why should I tell you?” Floody said. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

At an “X” committee meeting a couple of days later it came out that Glemnitz had been asking dozens of people the same question. He had gone to every room in one block asking it.

“The cunning sod,” Roger said. “I’ll bet he’s checking all the different answers and reactions to try and get some idea if there’s a tunnel going.”

He sent word around the compound that if Glemnitz spoke to anyone he was to ignore him completely.

The Russian prisoners came back about June 10. About a hundred of them surrounded by German tommy-gunners deployed into the wood outside the south fence and started chopping the trees down. Convoys of trucks came and carted the trunks and foliage away, and in four days the edge of the wood had slid back fifty yards.

Massey found an excuse to see the Kommandant, and Von Lindeiner told him they were building a new compound.

“It is for the Americans,” he said. “We are going to segregate you.”

“Surely that’s not necessary,” Massey objected. “We speak the same language. They’re our allies, and we get along very well together.”

“I think,” Von Lindeiner said dryly, “that is what the High Command had in mind. It is their order.”

Massey sent for Roger, Goodrich, Clark, and Wings Day and told them.

“It’s no good my working on the Kommandant,” he said. “If it’s an
Oberkommando
order, that’s all there is to it.” He turned to Goodrich. “You see what it means,” he said. “If they finish the compound before we finish a tunnel, your chaps are going to miss out.”

Goodrich asked if any date was fixed for the move to the new compound.

“Von Lindeiner either didn’t know or wouldn’t say,” Massey said. “I myself think it should be about two months.” He looked inquiringly at Roger. “What about it, Bushell?”

“The obvious thing, Sir, is to concentrate on one tunnel for the time being. ‘Tom’ is the most advanced. We’ll go flat out on it.”

“What are the chances?” asked Goodrich.

Roger said confidently, “We can do it if we’re lucky. We might need a bit of luck because we might have to cut a few corners.”

He told the committee the new program without hesitation. In view of the dispersal bottleneck there was no point in going ahead with “Dick” or “Harry” at the same time. Selected diggers could do up to twelve feet a day. Fanshawe guaranteed the penguins could handle that much. More would mean risks.

That night, Minskewitz scraped out the soap that sealed the edges of “Dick’s” trap and put in cement. Crump cemented “Harry’s” trap solidly all around so that it was again part of the floor.

Roger and Floody picked the fifteen best diggers and split them into three shifts to work “Tom.” They included Lamond, Cornish, and Rees because they were short and wiry, tailormade for underground work. They left off some of the big fellows like Kirby-Green. There was nothing wrong with Kirby-Green’s work but he had such massive shoulders he occasionally knocked a box frame out of plumb and caused falls. Roger put all the American diggers on the team.

“Whether we break ‘Tom’ or not,” Goodrich said, “I want to take as many experienced men to the new compound as possible. Some of the boys might get homesick.”

There were Americans on every factory, and they didn’t need much teaching. The ones with Travis could do anything with their hands.

Crump, Marshall, and Johnny Bull took over as the three shift bosses on “Tom,” and Floody was overseer (and digger as well — all the shift bosses dug). Though he was tall and hefty, Roger himself insisted on going on one of the digging teams. He was tired of using only his voice.

They pressed forward ten feet the next day, and Fanshawe got rid of it all without trouble. The following day Floody was half buried in another bad fall that left a dome four feet high over the tunnel roof. His number two pulled him out by the ankles, and they were an hour and a half reframing and packing it. That day they made only eight feet.

There seemed to be a hoodoo on Floody for falls. His ear was so sharply cocked for the crack of falling sand that he could reverse down a tunnel nearly as fast as he could run. Tokyo Jones still had the blithe confidence that he’d never be buried. Floody sent him up to the face next day, and Jones had made about two feet forward and was just putting in the top board of the frame to shore the roof when about two hundred pounds of sand crashed down, and he just had his feet sticking out. Floody was able to pull him out and, when he’d got his breath back and finished cursing, the American got grimly and silently to work clearing the sand.

“I never knew anything would keep you so quiet so long,” said Floody, amused, and Jones looked back over his shoulder, the whites of his eyes standing out in the lamplight in his dirty, sweaty face.

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” he said. “Boy, I certainly inherited some that time.”

Floody was buried again the following day, and this time the sand tipped the hot fat lamp against his leg and held it there. His number two pulled him out nearly screaming, a great patch of red and blistered flesh on his thigh. They had run into such a soft patch that they started box-framing all the way again.

By the end of the week, “Tom” was 105 feet long, and Flood, Crump, and Marshall built the halfway house. Floody wanted halfway houses every hundred feet. Beyond that distance the rope hauling the railways tended to scrape against the shoring and there was too much danger of knocking frames out.

They made the halfway houses about ten feet long and about six inches wider and higher than the main tunnel, using longer boards for the shoring. It was a staging post, and no rails were laid in it. Two extra men lay there, with just enough room to turn around. As the trolley came back from the face, one man lifted the sand boxes off and passed them to the next man who put them on a second trolley and sent them back to the shack. Travis had the second trolley ready as soon as the halfway house was finished.